Penal military unit

The hiring of prisoners for combat and military service, often in exchange for freedom, is a common trope in modern fiction and popular culture, with narratives centering around penal units appearing in films, television, novels, and video games.

One of the earliest examples of penal military units was established, were written in the Chinese annals Records of the Grand Historian and Book of Han.

[3] The disbandment of conscripted armies and end of large scale warfare following the Napoleonic era led to the decline of the penal battalion system in continental Europe.

The Battalions of Light Infantry of Africa (Bats d'Af) was formed by order of Louis Philippe I in 1832 for the purpose of expanding the French colonial empire.

In contrast to the Bats d'Af, the compagnies d'exclus were outright penal units consisting of convicts condemned to five years or more of hard labor and judged unworthy to carry weapons.

Prior to the early 1900s, the Portuguese Empire relied largely on military convicts to augment the regular and indigenous troops employed to provide garrisons for its overseas colonies.

Courts offered defendants the option of enlisting to avoid imprisonment, while young offenders in borstals and adult prisoners were granted early release for their service.

The combination of criminals, political prisoners, and undisciplined soldiers that made up a Strafbataillon often required harsh measures to be imposed for unit cohesion to be maintained.

[9] Certain penal military units, such as the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, gained a reputation as being brutal towards civilian populations and prisoners of war, and were employed as anti-partisan troops due to the fear they inspired.

[10][11][12] Other units, most notably the 999th Light Afrika Division, suffered from poor morale and saw soldiers desert the Wehrmacht to join resistance groups.

[13] Following Operation Barbarossa and the entry of the Soviet Union into World War II, the Red Army began to seriously consider the implementation of penal military units.

A large number of Red Army soldiers who retreated without orders during the initial German invasion were reorganized into rudimentary penal units, the precursors to dedicated Shtrafbat.

Made up of deserters and those accused of cowardice, these penal battalions were given dangerous tasks such as scouting ahead of the main forces to check for ambushes, crossing rivers and torrents to see whether they were fordable, and traversing unmapped minefields.